Big Data rivals Hortonworks and Cloudera announces massive merger

Hortonworks and Cloudera announce a $5.2 billion merger – a deal which involves an all-stock merger and equal partnership for both the companies. The union will reap $1.2 billion in revenue and 2500 customers worldwide.

Hadoop, the once popular open-source platform gave rise to many big data companies and vendors.  But the complexity in Hadoop paved way for companies like Hortonworks and Cloudera to emerge from the pack and go public in 2014 and 2017 respectively.

The rival companies decided to fight the complexity with their big data offerings that did not require companies, especially IT organizations, to build Hadoop from scratch. But with more and more cloud-based big data solutions entering the market, rolling a Hadoop system seemed pointless – sapping the growth and revenue potential of companies like Hortonworks and Cloudera.

“Even though Cloudera and Hortonworks have both moved to provide consistent hybrid and multi-cloud capable solutions, services like Microsoft’s Azure and Google products seems to capture faster growth,” explains Henschen. But when Cloudera aimed at various classes of business problems, Hortonworks targeted the big data technologists. And hence “these differences may help them now as they become a single company,” said Carl Olofson, an IDC research analyst, in an interview in 2017.

Tom Reilly, the long-time CEO at Cloudera said in a statement, “Our businesses are highly complementary and strategic. By bringing together Hortonworks’ investments in end-to-end data management with Cloudera’s investments in data warehousing and machine learning, we will deliver the industry’s first enterprise data cloud from the Edge to AI.”